Pictured are Aunt Dot, 104-years-old, Trina Morgan, Joan Eacret, John Eacret, Cammi Gates and Gary Blackman.
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At 73, Joan Eacret is still baking, although a broken shoulder when she slipped running to answer the oven timer, has slowed her down a bit. To enter her house as a guest is to settle back to be served cookies and a cup of coffee. She is proud of the renovations she and her husband John have done on the little house in Coffey, including exposing the old wooden floors — treacherous to stocking feet or no.
“I’ve lived all over the country,” Joan said. “But this was the first trip John and I took together.”
They took a trip from Sept. 26 to Oct. 1 to Illinois to see an aunt Joan hadn’t seen in 25 years. Along the way she renewed contact with second cousins she hadn’t seen in their lifetime and first cousins she hadn’t seen in almost a decade.
Her aunt, Dorothy Blackman, lives in Maple Crest Nursing Home in Belvidere, Ill. She was 80 the last time Joan saw her.
“I didn’t think she’d know me after all those years,” she said. “But she looked up when she saw me and said, ‘Oh, you’re Joan.” That’s pretty good for a lady that’s almost 105-years-old.”
Joan lost track of her ‘northern’ family as a child and hasn’t had a reunion with them since. She was born in Cuba City, Wisc. She doesn’t have a lot of memories of those years, but she remembers one thing very well. When she was four, she nearly lost her left eye in a sledding accident.
“I was coming down the hill on my brother’s back,” she said. “Another brother was at the bottom of the hill. He lifted his sled to stick the runners in the snow. We ran into the sled. The blade runner went through my eye.”
After Joan’s sister developed rheumatic fever and her mother, too, needed a dryer, warmer climate for her health, the family moved south to Florida.
They continued to move around quite a bit as her father found work — from Florida to the Mojave Dessert in California to Texas. Her father worked on a ranch in New Mexico. Then back to Florida.
“I was totally blind in my left eye until the age of 13,” said Joan. “A surgery was performed at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla., which brought back some of my sight. I can see peripherally.”
The family then headed north to Fairfield, Iowa, where her father found a job taking care of a cattle farm.
It was a fast-paced life and Joan was married when she was 16, divorced at 25, and a grandmother by the time she was 31. She now has three children; 11 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Back then, as a single mother living in Platte City, Joan always worked three jobs to support her and her children. She worked as a head cook in a nursing home, as an assistant at the daycare at her church, and at fast food restaurants. She didn’t have a lot of time for extended family during that period.
Lately, her aging aunt has been on her mind a lot.
“I talked to a niece who had gone to see her,” Joan said. “She said she was spry but frail. She could have company. We had to figure out a way to get up there — time is short.”
The northerners were shocked and delighted to hear she was coming.
“Oh my goodness, they were ecstatic,” said Joan. “I’d never met Dot’s daughter-in-law Shelba. We’d talked on phone and wrote, so I felt like we knew each other. My second cousins Trina and Cammi took time off from work to meet me at the nursing home.”
Joan and John were married in 2007 in Tracy, Mo., and moved to Trenton in 2008. They moved to Coffey the next year where they have lived the last nine years.
“I don’t work now, but I still can’t get out of cooking,” Joan said.
John, 69, was born in Portland, Ore. He was married 36 years when his first wife passed away. He worked in heavy construction and has been a trucker for the last 19 years. He retired in 2004. He has three children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Joan and John have been involved in the community, although not always happily. Joan has served as clerk at the fire department. John has served as the mayor of Coffey and also worked on the fire department.
He and Joan went to a local church where they were both baptized. John, with his long white beard, was a shoe-in to play Santa at any holiday events. He has been Santa for the last three years. At first he handed out candy on the back of a fire truck on a cold, blistery day. Then after that, they handed out candy with their own pickup. They asked permission to hand candy out in a church, but there were those who complained that John wasn’t an ideal Christian and Santa wasn’t really a Christian figure or symbol either. It made Joan and John mad and they haven’t been back to the church.
Still, Joan baked 87 loaves of bread, 15 pounds of fudge, and 36 dozen cookies last year. They loaded it all up, got in their truck, and handed the candy out all over town on their own.
Both are now retired with more time to spend on hobbies, renovating the house, and visiting friends and family.
Aunt Dorothy looked good for 104. They spent their time together talking about the past and their families. It was a bittersweet goodbye. Aunt Dot didn’t want them to go.
“We plan to go back when we have more time to spend together,” Joan said.
The trip gave John a brand new perspective. John’s mother lives in Sandy, Oregon. His parents divorced when he was 2 1/2 years old. His mother took the girls and his father took the boys. He has not seen his mother in 67 years.
“It’s our next trip,” he said.